4ccc0f9200a7a

I'm autistic and this passage is disturbing to me:

"It upended many of the ... sort of inherited pieces of wisdom that I thought I knew about autism. For example, that people with autism can't emote, or that they don't have emotions, or they can't imagine that they're inside the head of someone else. And also, that they don't have imaginations, or don't aspire to other areas of life more than a day-to-day survival. Naoki, even when he was writing as a 13-year-old ... seemed, internally, to be as fully-functioning and as capable of — if not enjoying life, aspiring to enjoy life — as a neurotypical child. So this made all the difference for us."

Our basic humanity is a revelation to people, even our parents, and they have to learn about it from books when we're right there. I swear that a lot of the clinical language around autism is normal people projecting. I mean, think of the terrible things he admitted believing about his own son, and tell me that's not a theory-of-mind or empathy impairment.

I've never thought, "Gee, normal people are different than me. They must be robots unlike myself, the real human being." There's obviously someone IN there, also in animals. People don't actually have a hard time thinking that their nonverbal animals are people, but they have a hard time thinking nonverbal people are people.

Really stop and think how fucked up it is for the stigma to be THAT dehumanizing. Try dating when people believe this stuff about you.

While people are going around assuming I don't have a mind, they also get to cause me a great deal of sensory discomfort, totally oblivious to the fact that they're doing it. Hooray for you, loud motorcycle guy! Nice lawn, asshole with a leaf blower!

http://wearelikeyourchild.blogspot.nl/2017/02/sometimes-its-...

If you read a passage like the one I quoted and it's a revelation to you, you should NOT pat yourself on the back for feeling aware and tolerant. You should feel ashamed for having spent your whole life until that moment making autistic people's lives shitty. And you should resolve to learn compassion for all sentient beings and meditate to make the world suffer less.

I appreciate the guy for his honesty that I could quote him to make a point. I think the reporter already decided it was a feel-good story, so they didn't probe into darker aspects of Autism Parents.

http://thesubjectsupposedtoknow.us/at-the-mercy-of-imbeciles...

http://thesubjectsupposedtoknow.us/lacanian-psychoanalysis-a...

http://thesubjectsupposedtoknow.us/this-is-autism-awful-bitc...

The fact that normal people can watch CHILD ABUSE and not understand that it's child abuse is much worse than me being blunt about describing the reality of why autism sucks, which is normal people.

I don't think normal people should feel good about autism right now. Why don't we just get rid of vaccination to prevent people like me from being born? That's pretty normal. It's not like eugenics is a new idea. Everybody knows Asperger cherry-picked the patients he reported and described them that way so the Nazis wouldn't kill them, right? (See Neurotribes)

They sterilized 2 of my great aunts for epilepsy. Both later committed suicide. Normal people did that, and it's normal to think that way now.

Something nobody ever thinks about: if this guy didn't understand his son was sentient for a long stretch of time before reading an autism autobiography, do you think maybe that contributed to his son's problems with mentalization and emotion regulation? Do you think that's a little bit invalidating, which when it happens chronically gives people borderline personality disorder, which makes people injure themselves? I REALLY question what's autism and what's the effect of normal people having autistic children.

http://thesubjectsupposedtoknow.us/imagine-if-1-in-68-childr...

Anyone can read online about why autistic adults think the standard treatment, ABA, is abusive. That's the not-feel-good part of "neurodiversity."

After years of "treatment" and talking about their kids in front of them like they're not there, parents then turn around and blame AUTISM and direct funds to prevention instead of doing anything to improve my life and the lives of people worse off than me. In fact, they're extremely hostile and dismissive of autistic adults, which is the world they're creating for their children. Other people have said this before me, for years.

Even more unpleasant truth: bullying and dehumanization are necessary features of capitalism, and it's white men's fault more than anyone else's.

http://thesubjectsupposedtoknow.us/slave-owners-thought-free...

Feel bad about autism today. Thanks.

Comprehensive explanation of how fucked up this is, from an autistic person instead of a mental health professional making money off stigmatizing us:

http://thesubjectsupposedtoknow.us/talking-back-about-my-def...

http://thesubjectsupposedtoknow.us/talking-back-about-my-def...

The cost of having to go through life with people believing all of that shit is indescribable. Like, this stuff makes people die alone for real. This stuff makes people unemployable and untouchable.

And it's a lot to do with the fact that "normal" people in our society have to be emotionally avoidant or they couldn't deal with how fucked up they're making everything on purpose. This is why emotional retardation is the definition of masculinity here. How can you dominate your slaves and have feelings at the same time?

In olden times, autistic people were probably the clergy everyone else turned to for moral guidance because we can actually think consistently without making every last thing about ego. It's not autistic people denying climate change over not knowing how to be a person if business ever did something bad.

I wish autism awareness would go the fuck away so I can explain myself to people instead of explaining why the authority on who I am is completely full of shit and needs their own therapy more than I do.

True fact: I'm an autistic psychologist and I encounter people with godawful theory of mind all the time, every day. Probably half the mentalization problems in autism come from the trauma of what the normal people do to us, but it doesn't occur to anybody that autistic people have feelings to be traumatized about.

Do people realize that the overwhelming majority of information on autism is highly pejorative, even stuff by autism experts claiming to be our friends?

http://thesubjectsupposedtoknow.us/tony-attwood-and-the-neol...

http://thesubjectsupposedtoknow.us/darold-treffert-and-the-a...

Asperger's isn't a real problem. It only looks that way because the normal people have decided to base nearly all social interactions on avoidance and dishonesty because they're lacking in emotional resilience because they're raised by TV, which makes them feel bad on purpose. Our culture is based on being a sleazy businessperson and making a religion out of that.

Autistic people watched the "good people" stand there and do nothing while they got bullied. We're not naive.

This is a society where being a wife beater is actually less of an obstacle to finding relationships than having an autism diagnosis.

The normal people want it to be middle school forever because they liked it there, at our expense.

Try to spend a week and make note of how many things you see shit-talking either black people or autistic people. Now imagine all of those things are directed at you and that's what daily life is.

Fuck you, too, normal people.

Except that Zen is the school of "sudden enlightenment." Suzuki: "Enlightenment is not some good feeling or some particular state of mind. The state of mind that exists when you sit in the right posture is, itself, enlightenment."

It's hard to see how being a capitalist overlord is compatible with any reasonable definition of "right livelihood," which is part of the Eightfold Path.

Zen is criticized by other Buddhists for its lack of emphasis on ethics. It's hard to see how being a samurai is compatible with "right action," either.

I don't think the question of who is or isn't "really" Buddhist is very interesting. I just think it's annoying to act like Steve Jobs is a good example of anything spiritual because he made pretty things at great cost to other people's lives, the planet, human decency, etc.

Buddhism stresses compassion and identifies desire and the ego as the causes of suffering. Steve Jobs was, you could say, "interpersonally abrasive" and made a fortune by encouraging people to want devices built using slave labor from raw materials whose extraction harms people living nearby. You need a new one every year, too.

In that sense, Steve Jobs was about as Buddhist as the "prosperity gospel" people are Christian.

Richard Stallman was correct that the death of Steve Jobs was a good thing.